


The Shape of Things to Come

by gallifreyburning



Category: Doctor Who, Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-06 05:24:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15879432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyburning/pseuds/gallifreyburning
Summary: During the Time War, Leela and Narvin are on a mission to save a young Ace McShane from Daleks meddling in her timeline. Romana's mission briefing didn't remotely prepare them for a night in a punk club in London, 1986.





	The Shape of Things to Come

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place sometime before "Gallifrey: Time War Volume 1". This story was inspired by [this lovely piece of art by alyona11](http://alyona11.tumblr.com/post/177170374561/i-guess-you-all-well-know-that-i-think-that-narvin).

Narvin lands the TARDIS quietly on a London street, without a single judder or thud. Leela decides to withhold final judgment on whether or not he’s a better driver than the Doctor until she determines whether he brought them to the time and location Romana gave him, before she waved goodbye and sent them off from Gallifrey.

The two of them step out of the TARDIS – emerging from what looks like a slightly oversized red post-box, thanks to the functioning chameleon circuit – onto the dark, mostly empty sidewalk. A few pedestrians stagger down the opposite curb, and two blocks away, a small crowd clusters outside a door, shivering and restless in the cool winter air.

Sucking in a deep breath until her chest tingles, Leela grins. “This is Earth!”

Narvin’s nose wrinkles. “One could hardly mistake the smell.”

“I have missed it!” she says, enthusiasm unaffected. She turns to the nearest street sign, squinting at the letters. “And we are in London?”

“Near a suburb called Perivale, nineteen eighty-six local time. Exactly where I promised we'd land, every time you tried to tell me how to steer the TARDIS.” He shifts from one foot to another, pulling the white cuffs of his dress oxford and tugging at the lapels of his tuxedo jacket. He’s obviously been longing for his CIA robes, complaining three times already about the tightness of his trousers and the ostentatious shine of his shoes. The only thing he seems satisfied with is the black and white color scheme.

Leela’s long-sleeved formal silk dress, the shade of a Cadonwood leaf at the peak of summer, shimmers in the darkness. The fragile silver fabric seems inappropriate for the battle ahead, but Romana insisted it was necessary for this place and time. Blending in is their priority, at the moment; battle comes later. And while she might have agreed to the flimsy dress, she did not agree to the flimsy strappy shoes. The tall silver boots Romana found for her, instead, feel reassuringly sturdy on her feet. 

She points down the street, at the small crowd. “And this is the club where we’re supposed to find young Ace?”

“And the Dalek agent, yes,” Narvin replies grimly.

“Come then, we should not waste time.” Leela sets off at a brisk stride, and Narvin jogs to catch up.

“Remember, we can’t let Ace see us. We’re early in her timeline, she’s still a child. We can’t risk contaminating her –”

“You do not have to repeat Romana’s instructions from five microspans ago,” Leela interrupts. The silk skirt swishes around her knees with each step, and she can’t decide if she enjoys the sensation or not. “I remember: this is Ace's first meeting with the Dalek agent, who will act as a false friend and lure her away from her one true timeline with the Doctor. They will recruit her to work for the Daleks instead. We will kill this agent, and restore her proper life path.”

“The way the war has been going lately, I wouldn’t be surprised if the agent tries to kill Ace, if they think their plan is going to fail. So we can’t afford to be distracted.”

“We will kill this Dalek agent without revealing ourselves to Ace, and then we will find a chip shop to celebrate,” she says.

“Leela, that’s”  – the deepest of sighs – “that’s exactly the sort of distraction I’m talking about. This isn’t a sightseeing trip. Do you know what behavior I’m modeling right now, by not asking you to explain what a chip shop is? Focus. _Not_ being distracted.”

Leela glances at him sideways, flashing her teeth. The night air has invigorated her whole being, the darkness like a palpable thing against her skin. She is on the hunt, here in this place where she spent so much time with the Doctor. As much as Gallifrey has become her home, returning to these old stomping grounds feels like another kind of homecoming.

Narvin, on the other hand, doesn’t look invigorated at all. He looks like a grumpy corpse, with wide eyes and pale skin, as they approach the crowd and the club entrance.

Before the two of them left Gallifrey, Romana had explained that in this century, an Earth club was a social gathering place for the upper echelons of human society, where people paid for membership and needed special papers to get inside. They only entered when wearing a specific uniform: fragile, low-cut frocks, or tight suits like Narvin’s. Having spent time in nineteenth century Earth with Jago and Litefoot, Leela is passing familiar with this kind of establishment. Romana had warned that there would be lots of talking and hobnobbing, whatever that was. Narvin had assured Leela that he had this part of the operation fully under control, and all she had to do was keep her mouth shut and wait for him to identify the Dalek agent.

She was expecting this club to be cold and austere, similar to the tiresome Time Lord political events inside the Capitol. She had braced herself for an evening of boredom, of biding her time and biting her tongue until she was able to pull the knife from its sheath on her thigh, and do her work to save young Ace.

This club, however, doesn’t have any air of austerity at all. Light strobes out of the half-open door, along with a deep, gut-thumping musical beat. It’s as if a thousand drummers stand just inside, pounding away like their lives depend on it. If anything, this place reminds Leela of the establishments she occasionally visits in Low Town, the undercity beneath the Capitol. She escapes there when the air inside the dome grows heavy with the weight of Time Lord stuffiness and pretension, and she needs to breathe.

Here, the small crowd stands in a line, waiting for a turn in front of the large man blocking the door. “A guard,” Leela says, slowing down and putting out a hand to catch Narvin’s arm. “Just like Romana warned us there would be.”

“Psychic paper,” he replies, pulling a leather wallet from his breast pocket. “For precisely this scenario. See? I’m prepared. _Focused_. We’ll simply wait our turn.”

As they stand in line, Narvin fine-tunes the small device he brought from the CIA. A detector of some sort, to help him identify the Dalek agent; Leela isn’t interested in the details of how it works. Romana told her that the Dalek agent would have a specific heat signature, and Leela is confident in her ability to find such warm-blooded prey without any gadgets.

She crosses her arms against the cold and studies the people around them. They look very different than she and Narvin, their hair coiffed to wild heights and dyed in even wilder colors, almost like birds. They all wear clothes torn and studded with metal. Narvin doesn’t seem concerned, or perhaps he hasn’t noticed; Leela catalogues it all, noting the beautiful piercings and tattoos and wondering about their significance.

When their turn comes to face the guard, a burly bald man wearing a truly prodigious amount of leather, his face splits open in a laugh.

“Jeeeeeeysus Christ, did you two wankers lose a bet and get kicked out of some posh do on the other side of town?”

Undaunted, Narvin hands over his wallet. “We’re here for the club. I think you’ll see that everything’s in order.”

He glances at the paper, which appears blank to Leela’s eyes but seems to hold some meaning for the bald man. Afterward, his gaze sizes her up from head to toe, as if she is wearing no clothing at all. She stares back at him as if her blade is already at his throat.

“You can go in, love,” he says to her, and then tosses the wallet back at Narvin. “You can piss right off, back to the City and your day trading, or whatever the fuck you posh assholes do all day.” His gaze moves to the people behind them. “Next.”

“I beg your pardon,” Narvin says, his back up straight, vibrating with pique. “Piss right what?”

“You heard me,” the bald man says.

Leela puts a hand on Narvin’s arm and steps forward a fraction, so she’s partially in front of him. The sheath of her knife rests comfortably against her thigh, and she calculates exactly how long it will take her to get this skirt out of the way before she can draw it. Longer than she’d like.

Maybe he senses her thoughts, or maybe he just notices the strategic placement of her knife leg, but Narvin makes a warning noise in the back of his throat that sounds like her name.

“This man is with me,” Leela says, most definitely _not_ reaching for her knife. “We go in together.”

“Then you can both piss right off.” He raises his hand and points back the way they came, down the dark street, but the gesture has the implied malice of a blow. “Next.”

The people behind them in line start to grumble at the delay.

“I will go inside, and so will my companion,” Leela repeats, moving forward again in answer to the man’s threatening gesture.

“You’ll go right to hell, if I have to toss you through the gates myself.”

“We have orders not to create a scene. Come on, Leela,” Narvin huffs, closer than she expects; his hand closes around her elbow and he tries to tug her sideways, out of line. She allows it, without taking her eyes off of the large bald man.  His laugh echoes after them as they walk to the corner of the building.

“Hardly an auspicious start,” Narvin mumbles, peering into the distressingly dark alleyway in front of them. A faint light shines halfway down the building. “But surely the structures in this world aren’t much different than the ones on Gallifrey, and they have secondary entrances.”

“We sneak in,” Leela says, delighted. He glances down the street, making sure her voice didn’t carry to the bald man. “Very good, Narvin. Come on.”

Without hesitation, she plunges into the pitch alleyway. Narvin picks his way along behind her, weaving in between pungent bags of garbage and unsettling lumps that may or may not be alive.

“Day trading. _Day_ trading? _Day trading_?!” he hisses behind her, like a cat with its back up. “Earth isn’t a temporal power, they shouldn’t have the technology to collect or redistribute time. I’ll have to open an investigation, when I get back to the Agency.”

Leela lets him continue to talk, because it seems to make him more comfortable, and they aren’t currently in danger from anyone else in this alley. When he reaches the high, narrow window halfway down the building, she has already shifted bags of garbage out of the way and pulled herself up by the fingertips, to glance through the half-open glass.

She drops back to the ground and tells him, “This will do.” Then she hauls herself onto the windowsill like a gymnast, swinging her body up and through the window. Her silk dress catches on something sharp, and she hears it rip, but she wriggles inside.

She finds herself inside a filthy lavatory. A toilet in one corner, a sink in the other, and paper and plastic detritus all over the floor. The stench is overwhelming. The music, oppressively loud, thumps through the chipboard lavatory door and across the peeling laminate floor like a living thing.

Luckily, she’s alone for the moment, so the turns around and heaves herself up halfway through the window again, to help Narvin. He stands with his arms crossed and shoulders hunched, staring up and down the alley as if expecting a squad of Daleks any microspan.

“Ssst! Come on!” He stares up at her backlit silhouette with wide eyes, and reaches obediently for her hands. Between the two of them, they manage to haul him through the lavatory window, wriggling inelegantly the whole way. He falls the last few feet and ends up sprawled on the sticky floor, then scrambles to his feet as quickly as if he’d just fallen face-first into a pile of baziti bat droppings.

While he’s grimacing and picking pieces of damp paper from his suit, she reaches down to rip off the already torn hem of her dress. She uses the strip of silk to bind her hair into a high ponytail, red curls spilling like a fountain around her head. Then she seizes her long sleeves and pulls them off the dress at the shoulder, the fabric making a satisfying _scritch_ as it gives way.

“What are you doing?” Narvin asks, aghast.

“Tonight we are hunters. A skilled hunter blends in with her surroundings, so as not to startle prey,” she explains patiently, seizing one of his wrists and unbuttoning the cuff of his shirt. She shoves the sleeves of his shirt and jacket up to his elbow, just like the other people in line had done. Next she untucks his oxford, letting the shirttails hang down. He watches himself being manhandled with his mouth agape, as if powerless to intervene.

She pauses briefly, surveying her work, and considers the bowtie around his neck. When they had changed clothes in the CIA’s fieldwork facility on Gallifrey, Narvin had managed everything but this strange strip of black fabric. He’d stepped out from behind the privacy screen in his Earth tuxedo, tie in hand. “What in Rassilon’s name is this supposed to be?”

“Oh, I know this thing! The Doctor used to wear something like it,” Leela had said, seizing it in excitement. He lifted his chin as she positioned it around his neck, fiddling until it was tied lopsidedly against his adam’s apple.

“Leela, that’s all wrong. It isn’t supposed to dangle so much,” Romana had chided, coming over to nudge her out of the way and take a turn. Leela stood back and supervised, hands on her hips. Narvin shifted from one foot to another, looking for all the world like he’d just discovered himself in the midst of a Death Zone match. The tie rearranged, Romana said, “There, much better.”

Leela shook her head and reached for Narvin’s neck again. “No, Romana, it should sit beneath the collar. Don’t you remember, how the Doctor used to –”

“No, nono, it’s fine,” Narvin had interrupted, backing away so quickly he’d bumped his head on the wall, and that was the last anyone said about his lopsided, floppy bowtie.

Now that it’s just the two of them here on Earth, when Leela reaches for it, he doesn’t flinch. She binds the tie around his head like a headband, knotted in the back, then steps away to survey her work. “Much better,” she says. “No one will tell us to piss at anything, again.”

The door of the lavatory bangs open and two people stumble inside, a tangle of arms and legs and liquor fumes. One man has his hands jammed deep inside the other man’s trousers, and the fact that the lavatory is already occupied hardly seems to register. Music floods in with them, thumping through the air, and now the accompaniment of screeching instruments and human vocals are clear too.

“You wanna join in?” one of the men finally slurs, when he notices Leela and Narvin staring in surprise. He fumbles for the doorknob, making to close it again, with all four of them inside. “Your girlfriend can stay too.”

“Very kind, I’m sure. We’re on a mission and don’t have time,” Narvin replies, seizing Leela’s hand and dragging her along as he edges around the men, into the main part of the club.

“Have fun,” Leela calls after them, as they shut the door.

“This is a disaster,” Narvin gasps, but Leela can’t hear him; she only guesses at his words, from the movement of his mouth. Music thumps through every one of her cells, and the humid, pungent air pulses against her skin. The room is bigger than she expected, with a long bar at one end, a section of tall tables and stools nearby, and an enormous area filled to the brim with people undulating in rhythm to the music. A single woman stands atop a dais off to one side, wearing a large device on her head. At first Leela thinks she must be the Dalek agent, and this device is her controller, but the woman sways back and forth in time to the music, grinning and touching dials and switches on a control board of some kind, and she seems far too human to be suspect. The thing on her head is a listening device, Leela decides, and nothing sinister.

She comes up onto her toes and steadies herself with a hand on Narvin’s shoulder, stretching to put her lips against his ear: “This is an excellent hunting ground. And look: Ace is already here.”

She’s sitting at a tall table, practically wedged between the bar and the far wall. Romana told them, in her briefing, that this Ace would be only sixteen years old, but she looks even younger than Leela imagined. Her hair is in a high, tangled ponytail that resembles Leela’s, and she’s wearing the same sort of ripped and studded clothes as the other clubgoers. 

“That boy with her – is he the Dalek agent?” Leela says.

He seems of an age with Ace, with red hair and freckles. The two of them are talking, and sipping from brown bottles.

Narvin angles his body toward her, leaning down to put his mouth to her ear, now. “No, he’s a known associate of Ace’s during this time in her history. Both of them have an eye on the front door – they’re still waiting for contact from the Dalek agent.”

Leela rocks onto her toes again, jostling close as the crowd ebbs and flows around them. Narvin’s body feels cooler than the humid jungle air in this room, and she finds the sensation soothing. “Then we wait for our prey.”

He nods, fishing in his pocket for the Dalek detector. He fiddles with it and then seizes Leela’s hand and pulls her around the edge of the room. Moving in here is nearly impossible, and they weave precariously between tightly-packed groups of socializing humans around the outside, and the mass of dancers in the middle. Narvin stops once they’re along the same wall as Ace, close enough to observe without being too obvious.

He fiddles with the detector again and then frowns, shaking his head at Leela. Nothing, yet.

They stand and watch, while everyone around them practically riots. A group of women next to Leela shriek and drink from glasses full of dark liquid; next to Narvin, a man and woman kiss with wild abandon, completely oblivious to anyone else around them. Every time their amorous enthusiasm causes them to bump into Narvin, he edges closer to Leela.

She tolerates this state of affairs for a microspan, and then seizes him by both lapels and pulls him down to her level. “We should search, instead of standing here like statues. If your device is not working, we still have to find the agent before it finds young Ace.”

His eyebrows draw together, a perfect crease forming between them, and he frowns. “This is the only decent vantage point in the room. How do you propose to search, in this savage insanity?” He waves in frustration at the gyrating mass of people.

“You watch young Ace and your machine. I will search,” Leela replies, slipping away from him and plunging into the dancing mass. It’s easy to ignore him calling her name, in this noise.

These humans are not Leela’s people, but they are her species. She does not know the steps to this particular dance, but she feels the music in her marrow, and her body knows how to respond. Narvin probably would have tried marching across the dance floor, seizing and inspecting each clubgoer for any sign of Dalek influence, but the press of dancers makes marching impossible. And so Leela does what comes instinctively, and she moves with the crowd instead of pushing against it.

In her time, Leela has perched for hours in a tree and waited for her prey to walk beneath, her body swaying with the wind and the branches. She has held her tongue and waited patiently to take down her enemies on Gallifrey, standing as still as a Time Lord when the occasion calls for it. And now, here on this human planet with her own species, on this particular hunt, she dances.

Her hands rise and her hips sway in time with the beat, strange lyrics pumping through dozens of speakers surrounding the space:

 _Ever fallen in love with someone_  
_Ever fallen in love, in love with someone_  
_Ever fallen in love, in love with someone  
_ _You shouldn't have fallen in love with?_

Leela moves easily through the throng, pressed so close on every side that she has no trouble touching the people around herself to test for the Dalek agent’s elevated body temperature. Everyone is warm, but she trusts her instinct enough to know that she’ll recognize the unnatural creature when she encounters it.

Almost immediately after she touches the people around her, many of them return the favor. First is a woman who grins at Leela, metal studs protruding from her tongue. She seizes her by the arm and thrusts her hips forward, grinding against Leela’s thigh. Leela smiles back, touching the woman’s face, but her temperature isn’t abnormal. With the same move she’d use to extract herself from grappling with an opponent during sparring, Leela spins away from the woman and wiggles deeper into the crowd.

After she brushes one man's neck with the back of her hand, he seizes her, grabbing from behind and shoving his hips against her ass. She reaches up and behind herself, to grab his spiked-up hair. With a yank and a twist, she drags his head down and forces it around. His body follows, peeling away from her, and she doesn’t let go until his follicles give way and she has tufts of dyed-green hair between her fingers. He shouts in pain and anger, the sound lost in the screeching lyrics of the new song pulsing over the speakers, but Leela has already moved on, still searching.

She catches glimpses of young Ace through the crowd, still sitting with her red-headed friend, looking more restless by the microspan.  She keeps an eye on Narvin, too, in case he tries to signal her. He’s leaning against the wall, arms crossed, and when he watches her he looks like he’s swallowed a bushel of lemons.

Leela continues to dance, methodically working her way through the crowded floor. She makes it almost all the way to the bar, feeling her way in search of the Dalek agent. When she’s close to the edge of the crowd, a tall stranger grabs her from behind, drawing her against his body.

Irritated, she gives him a well-placed elbow to the torso.

He crumples, squeaking “Leela!” Bent almost in half, Narvin lifts an arm to ward off her next blow.

“You should not try to sneak up on me!” she chides, unable to hide her worry as she helps him stand upright again. She runs her hands along his sides and stomach, feeling for broken ribs.

“You looked – you needed –” He gasps a few times, his breath returning slowly. He leans in closer, so she can hear his words. “You looked like you were in trouble.”

“The man who touched my hair?” she asks.

“No, the one following you across the room. He tried to pick you up – his hands were – oh, never mind.”

Leela scans the crowd behind Narvin and sees the man he means, only a few feet away, bouncing with aggressive energy to the song thumping through the speakers and glaring at the back of Narvin’s head. His eyes meet Leela’s and he grins, baring his teeth in a way that sends a shiver up her spine, but with Narvin decisively occupying the space between them, he doesn’t move any closer. She considers pulling her knife or making a threatening gesture to warn him away, but decides the most efficient deterrent is to simply hold onto Narvin, instead.  

The two of them stand toward the edge of the dance floor, closer to Ace than they’ve been all night, but still in the midst of the jumping and gyrating crowd. Ace scans the dance floor periodically as she sips from her brown bottle.

Leela puts a hand on the back of his neck and pulls him close. “Move, Narvin!” He misunderstands her intention and flinches, ready to break into a run away from whatever danger she’s seen. Her hand automatically fists into the back of his collar, holding him tight so he can’t leave, and she explains, “Ace is looking in our direction, and if we do not move with the other dancers, we will draw her attention!”

Narvin’s eyes dart toward that side of the room and he nods in understanding. Leela knows him well enough to realize he won’t throw himself into the dance with any kind of abandon, and she urges him into a swaying motion, because any movement at all is better than attracting Ace’s eye with their unnatural stillness.

 _And if a double-decker bus crashes into us_  
_To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die_  
_And if a ten-tonne truck kills the both of us  
_ _To die by your side, well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine_

Narvin had chided Leela for her distraction from the mission when they first landed. But she hasn’t once lost focus on why they’re here or what they’re doing, not even when her mouth watered at the thought of tasting chips for the first time in ages. But now, he’s the distracted one. He stares at her face, his lips slightly parted as if he wants to say something, instead of keeping a proper lookout of the room behind her.

For some reason she can’t articulate, her hand is still fisted in the back of Narvin’s collar, holding him close. When her other hand had finished checking for broken ribs, it lost momentum and settled on the right side of his chest, over one of his hearts.

After a long moment, he leans in close enough so their cheeks brush: “How do you know what to do? How to move? All these humans! It’s like watching a flock of wild creatures flapping in unison, and I don’t understand the underlying biological principle.”

“Are you asking if there’s a reason humans dance?” she laughs in his ear. She doesn’t pull away, not because she’s distracted, she decides, but because cheek-to-cheek is the most efficient way for the two of them to maintain eyes on the whole room.

“No. I meant that I don’t know how. I need you to show me,” he replies, strangely hoarse.

This wild, rioting nest of humanity is certainly Narvin’s personal version of hell, and he had plunged into it for her sake, when he thought she was in danger. Or maybe he did it for his own sake, because he’d watched her touch and be touched for as long as he could stand it. Maybe it didn’t matter exactly what his reason was. For Leela, standing here in this deafeningly loud room with her arm around his shoulders and one of his hearts thumping away under her palm, this moment is a quiet revelation.

“Put your arms around me,” she says, because he asked for direction, and it’s the only one she wants to give him right now.

He does as she says, hands coming to rest in the small of her back, against the fragile silk fabric of her torn dress. Surrounded by her own species, she savors the feel of his cool Time Lord cheek against hers and the hesitant sway of his body. He’s hardly moving at all, certainly not anything that would remotely qualify as dancing.

The song changes again, a different singer shouting staccato words. The crowd around them starts bouncing faster, heads bobbing in rhythm with the drums. He doesn’t let go of her, but then again, she doesn’t let go either. Because she is incredibly focused, and not distracted by chips or Time Lords, Leela resists the desire to close her eyes and lean fully into him. Instead she watches Ace and the casual way she’s chatting with her red-headed companion. They seem happy in each other’s company, even while obviously annoyed that the third person they’re expecting – the person they don’t know is a Dalek agent – hasn’t arrived yet. Ace hasn’t ever mentioned this friend, and she thinks that when she finishes this mission and returns to Gallifrey, she will ask what happened to him.

The red-headed friend says something and Ace throws her head back, laughing. Her gaze sweeps across the dance floor, and her eyes connect briefly with Leela’s.

Icy dread jolts from her scalp to heels. She buries her face in Narvin’s shoulder, a belated attempt to hide. Unaware of what happened, he responds to the gesture by drawing her tighter against his body.

He is vibrating.

“Narvin, something is happening in your trousers,” she says, still trying to hide her face. Has Ace stopped looking, and moved on?

“Mmm?” She can’t hear it, but she feels the sound of his reply through his chest.

Leela peeks over Narvin’s shoulder to find that Ace has left her table to walk to the lavatory, and is certainly not concerned with Leela.

“The Dalek device! In your trousers!” she shouts over the music, pulling away. He moves too slowly for her taste, so she reaches into his pocket for the little machine. It pings away, lights flashing.

Narvin’s dazed expression vanishes instantly, and he seizes the device. His eyes snap up to scan the crowd, and while he does his tracking, Leela keeps an eye out for Ace. She’s standing in a line for the lavatory, studying her fingernails.

“This way.” He moves, squeezing through the dancers toward the woman on the dais. Leela already has her knife in her hand, blade held securely against her forearm so as not to nick anyone in the crowd.

They weave halfway around the club, Narvin bumping into half the people in the room and huffing at them with increasing irritation, “Pardon. Excuse me. Do you _mind_!”

The tracker is leading them toward the lavatory, and Ace. A woman enters through the front door of the club, and Narvin points at her, his detector flashing more urgently. Decked in black leather from head to toe, with a shaved head covered in tattoos, she has spotted Ace and is making a beeline for her location.

“Are you sure she is a Dalek?” Leela asks, low and intense. “She does not look like a Dalek.”

“The energy signals say she’s saturated with Dalek technology,” Narvin says. “We knew they had developed nano-controlled infiltrator agents, indistinguishable from the native species on any given planet, but this is worse than I imagined.”

“Stay close to me and keep your head down,” Leela orders, plunging through the crowd. Her palms tingle and her stomach dances in time with the music, her entire body fizzing in anticipation of the kill ahead. The feeling is familiar, and strangely comforting. 

She reaches the woman before the woman reaches Ace, just far enough from the lavatory to avoid attracting her attention. Ace might not notice, but plenty of other people here would be absolutely riveted if Leela slices this woman’s throat in plain view, though. This kill requires subtlety.

Smiling, Leela puts her blade-free hand around the woman’s shoulders and brings their bodies together, moving with the music. The woman’s skin blazes beneath her fingertips, unnaturally dry and hot.

“Hey, bugger off!” The woman tries to back away, to extricate herself from Leela’s grip, but Leela holds tight.

“Dance with me, Dalek,” she says, baring her teeth.

An Earth human of this time period would have ignored the word for the gibberish it was, or at least registered confusion. This woman’s eyes are so dark they look black, and as soon as Leela names her, electric green flickers in the depths of her iris.

It’s the confirmation Leela needs.

The woman’s reaction is immediate: her arm comes across Leela’s body, seizing her by the shoulder, and she tries to lift her and fling her away. Leela bites off an instinctive battle scream and clings with all her strength to the back of the woman’s neck. Her arm wrenches in the socket at the force of the shove, but she keeps hold and angles her own body strategically, hiding her knife from view of the people around them, and drives it in under the woman's sternum, forcing the blade in and up until it stops at the hilt. The woman’s mouth drops open and she glances down in surprise. When she raises her eyes again, they’re full of fury.

This confrontation is going to turn into a full-on battle, right here in the middle of this crowd of Earthlings, with young Ace standing nearby, still in line for the lavatory. Keeping themselves hidden and preserving her timeline are paramount, Romana had said. More importantly, if Leela lets the fight happen here, humans could die.

The door to the lavatory swings open, and someone walks out. Without hesitation, she plants her silver boots firmly on the ground and lowers her stance. Using all the force she can muster, she barrels into the Dalek agent with her shoulder, shoving her backward. They stumble together, the woman grappling to get her balance and a hold on Leela at the same time, and the two of them careen into the open lavatory before the next person in line – Ace – can enter.

Leela slams the woman against the far wall in the small space, beneath the open window, and pulls the knife from her chest. She hopes that Narvin has the good sense to follow her in here, because there’s no way she can reach the door to close it, and conceal what’s happening from young Ace.

“Beg your pardon! It’s an emergency,” she hears him say, and then the door snaps shut.

She slashes the woman’s gut from hip to hip and stabs her twice more in the heart, rapid-fire, before the woman collects herself and seizes Leela by the ponytail, wrenching her head back. Agony rockets across her scalp, and her feet leave the floor as she’s hefted into the air.

His voice is close behind her in the tiny room, pitched high in urgency, “Leela, turn her around!”

Leela grabs the woman's shoulders with both hands, using them as leverage, and vaults off the edge of the toilet to gain more height, so she can plant her opposite knee into the woman’s stomach. As she comes down, she puts the weight of her fall into a blow to the woman’s elbow. Leela bites off another scream as her hair is pulled again, but the blow loosens her grip, and Leela slips free. Managing to keep her feet as she lands, she retrieves her knife from where she’d left it, between the woman’s ribs on the left side of her chest. This time she shoves it straight upward into her jaw, beneath her chin, driving the blade into her brain.

This makes the Dalek woman incandescently furious. Her black eyes flare bright green and stay that way as she snarls, a blood-curdling electronic sound. In a heartbeat, she seizes Leela around the neck with both hands and squeezes.

Someone pounds angrily on the door, and young Ace’s voice comes through the thin plywood, hardly audible over the deafening music: “Oi! You can’t just cut in the line like that! Do you hear me?!”

Narvin says desperately, “Leela! Turn her –”

“I am _trying_!” Leela chokes, yanking her knife from the woman’s chin and bracing to stab her in the head again, this time through the eye socket. A living thing would be pouring blood from the half dozen places Leela has cut her open, but she hasn’t leaked any fluid at all, human or Dalek. She doesn’t seem to feel pain like a living thing, but at least her flesh is vulnerable to the knife, and not made of metal.

With Leela momentarily contained, for the first time this woman has the chance to focus on Narvin. “Time Lord!” she hisses, eyes widening. Her words are garbled by the wound in her mouth, but her malice is unmistakable.

Letting go of Leela’s throat with one hand, she extends her arm past Leela's shoulder towards Narvin. A metal protrusion forms in her palm: a miniature gunstick, crackling with the same green energy in the depths of her irises. Obviously, the calculus of her threat assessment has been radically altered by his presence.

A pinpoint of light blossoms on Narvin’s chest, between his two hearts, as the weapon’s targeting system comes online. Everything is happening at breakneck speed, and in this small room there’s no place to hide and nothing to use for cover. With his back up against the door, he’s fully exposed. His knuckles have gone white around the detector gadget, and his blue eyes have gone wide with the realization of what’s about to happen, and the fact that he hasn’t any room to fight back or escape.

The sight of him, pinned and staring down the barrel of a Dalek gunstalk, ignites a raging sensation that bursts through Leela's pain and oxygen deprivation. This Dalek creature doesn’t have an eyestalk for her to destroy, so she immediately decides to cut its fucking head off.

“Open the door and face me, you wankers!” young Ace shouts from outside, rattling the door.

Simultaneously, Leela seizes the gunstalk arm before the weapon fully charges, wrenching it downward with all her strength. Her knife swings around and pierces through the Dalek agent’s forearm and into her hip, pinning her gunstalk to her side. Using the handle of the knife as leverage, with the blade buried to the hilt in the Dalek creature, she steps aside and shoves her forward, away from the wall, putting her face-to-face with Narvin.

He doesn’t shrink or flinch away. He thrusts his hand out, the tracking device in his palm, and jams it directly into the Dalek agent’s breastbone.

As he does, Leela yanks out her knife one last time and seizes the woman’s forehead from behind with one hand, and uses the other to draw her blade as deep and hard across her throat as she can manage. It will take several more cuts to sever her head completely, but this is a promising beginning.

A crackling sound spouts from the tracking device, which has attached itself to the Dalek woman. She goes rigid, and then begins trembling like she’s in the midst of a seizure. Leela steps back, releasing her, and she collapses to the floor in spasms.

Heaving for breath, Leela and Narvin stare at the Dalek agent, and then each other. Music pulses outside, and the door rattles under the force of young Ace’s fists.

“Are you alright?” he gasps, reaching toward her bruised neck. The Dalek agent twitches again.

“I will be, once I am sure this creature is dead,” Leela replies, words thick in her bruised throat. She’s already on her knees with her knife, holding the woman’s head steady, ready to finish her cutting job. Her body still moves occasionally, but if she’s still alive, she’s definitely unconscious.

Something heavy hits the door – Ace has resorted to kicking it from the other side. “Oi!” _Kick._ “You!” _Kick._ “Bloody!” _Kick._ “Wankers!” _Kick._ “No!” _Kick._ “Cutting!” _Kick._ “The line!” _Kick._

“No time! Out the window,” Narvin says, reaching down to grab the Dalek agent’s feet. “Into the alley, come on!”

With a growl of frustration, Leela sheathes her knife and helps him. They wrestle with the limp, heavy body, until it lands with a loud squelch on the other side of the wall. Leela boosts Narvin up to climb through next, and then she follows. Just as she pulls the window closed behind them, the door gives way to Ace’s barrage of kicks.

Narvin is already tossing bags of garbage atop the Dalek woman’s body, to hide her. Leela helps, then seizes his arm and drags him down the alley, away from the window’s light. Sure enough, a microspan later, the window pops open and young Ace’s head sticks out, peering into the darkness.

Narvin pushes Leela against the rough brick wall, covering her with his body. “Your dress,” he whispers, and she realizes he’s right: her shiny silver frock, mussed and battered as it is, will catch the light and draw attention. His black suit and darker hair are much better camouflage. She makes herself as small as possible, curling into his chest and trying to catch her breath. Narvin isn’t breathing at all, as still as a statue in front of her.

“Fucking cowards!” young Ace shouts into the darkness, and then pulls her head back inside and closes the window.

Leela and Narvin stay up against the wall for a time, to be sure Ace doesn’t stick her head outside again to yell at the night. His hand rests on her bicep, and as they wait, it traces up her shoulder and cradles the back of her neck, fingertips gentle on her bruised skin. When he finally starts breathing again, it comes in a soft staccato rush, and he lowers his head closer to hers.

She ought to finish cutting the head off of that Dalek creature. She ought to keep an eye on the alley, to make sure no one else finds the corpse. Instead, she closes her eyes and rests her weight against his body, allowing herself to relax for the first time all evening.

“Ace must have really needed to use that lavatory,” Narvin murmurs against her temple.

Leela suppresses a laugh, which makes her realize how much her esophagus hurts. Her shoulder aches, too, now that the heat of battle has passed and she has time to take mental stock of her injuries. When she speaks, the words come out with some difficulty. “I am not surprised that, even at such a young age, she was always ready for a fight.”

“I should make a note of that in her personnel file.”

“This is the third Dalek you and I have killed together. Does this mean we share a hobby?”

“I hope not,” Narvin replies, more seriously than she expects. His tone stirs her focus, brings it back to the reality of where and when they are.

“Is the thing dead?”

“Yes. That was a bio-E.M.P, designed to short circuit all biologically based nanotech. But I burned out the power source, using it like that.”

“We cannot use it again, if she rises?” Leela asks, words still slow and hoarse.

“No.”

She shifts him out of the way. “Stay here.”

Her knife is sharp, and cutting the Dalek thing’s head off doesn’t take long. She severs its gunstalk arm, for good measure. Narvin realizes what she’s doing, and stays exactly where she told him to. When she’s done, she beckons him over.

“You can land the TARDIS in this alley?” she asks. “Right now?”

“Yes,” he replies, without hesitation.

“I will stay here and wait.”

The exact instant he steps out of the alley and into the main street, the TARDIS materializes beside her, in the form of a dumpster. He timed it precisely, so that she wasn't alone even for a microspan. Leela decides he is a far superior driver than the Doctor. The two of them get all the pieces of the Dalek agent inside and safely locked into stasis. As she’s sharpening her knife, he comes into the console room with treatments for her injuries.

Leela lifts her head as he waves a medical device along her throat, and the soreness fades somewhat. “We cannot leave until we know young Ace is home safe.”

“Our mission only included killing the Dalek agent, but I have been thinking the same thing,” Narvin agrees. “We'll stay a while longer, to make sure the job is done properly.”

They find a stoop down the block and sit, waiting for Ace to emerge from the club. All of Leela’s adrenaline has worn off, and Narvin takes off his jacket and situates it around her shoulders.

“You’re shivering,” he announces, as if she didn’t already know how cold she feels.

Pulling the lapels closed, with her arms tucked inside, she says, “These Earth clothes suit you.”

“Everything pinches. No intelligent species should ever wear shoes this impractical, or clothes this tight.”

Leela looks him up and down, one side of her mouth lifting into a half grin. “Even so, they suit you.”

After a moment, his puzzled look fades into a faint blush. His mouth works silently, building momentum, and he finally says, “You look beautiful today.”

Her half grin blossoms into a full smile. “I am bruised and in need of a bath, and this fancy dress Romana gave me is torn to ribbons,” she says, less of an argument and more a statement of pride.

“Even so, you look beautiful today.”

Before she can reply, Ace and her red-headed friend step out of the club down the street. They wear an air of dejection, obviously disappointed to have been stood up by the person they were expecting. Leela stands. “Come. We will follow them.”

Trailing several blocks behind young Ace, far enough so as not to be noticed, they walk in companionable silence. Ace sticks out an elbow, and her friend hooks his arm around it, and they stay linked together like that for a long distance.

Narvin sticks out his elbow.  Leela looks at him, and the proffered appendage, and links her arm in his. Eventually Ace and her friend come to a building where Ace shimmies up a drainpipe and climbs into a window. Her friend waves goodbye, and goes on alone.

Leela and Narvin stand a distance away, arm in arm, and observe. “Will she be safe? Will the Daleks try again?” she asks.

With a shake of his head, he replies, “I don’t know. Probably. All we can do is monitor her timeline.”

“And come back when she needs us,” Leela finishes for him.

“And come back when she needs us,” he agrees.

After a moment, she takes a deep breath and grins. “Narvin, what do you smell?”

He inhales, his nose wrinkling. “Diesel combustion fumes. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen, several varieties of rotting organic material, and a faint hint of lyme from the pavement.”

“No, it smells like _chips_! There is an all-night shop nearby. We will find it.” Narvin opens his mouth to reply, and before he can object, she says, “And I will _not_ hear you tell me that I am distracted, or that this is sightseeing, because –”

“Because what is the point of fighting this war and protecting the people who matter to us” – his gaze flickers toward Ace’s house, then settles decisively on Leela – “if we don’t take the time to appreciate and enjoy the things we’re fighting for.”

She stares at him in surprise. “Yes, Narvin. Exactly.”

When she first met him, so many, many years ago, she wouldn’t have called him handsome. She has called him plenty of other things during the time they’ve known each other, few of them kind. But he has changed so much since their first mission together, to the doomed temporal peace conference where he was a diplomat and she was a dancer. Gradually, Leela has come to enjoy the sight of him more than nearly anything else in the universe, and his features have carved themselves into parts of her consciousness that she had thought died, along with Andred.

Her stomach fluttering and palms tingling, as if she’s about to step into battle, Leela rises onto her toes in a fluid dance-like movement. Her mouth presses against his once, soft and undemanding.

“Oh,” he says as he stares down at her, lips parted in surprise.

She doesn’t have to think of a reply, because suddenly his arms are around her, pulling her body against his. Her hands find the back of his neck, her head angling so she can reach him, and they kiss again, properly this time.

After a moment, Leela turns him and walks him backward a few steps, pinning him against the nearby wall. On her tiptoes, she opens her lips and her tongue brushes his mouth; his response is immediate, mouth opening and kiss deepening. A tiny, delightfully desperate sound comes from the back of his throat.

They stay there, tangled together against a building in a London suburb, for a long while.

When Leela’s stomach growls, she finally pulls away. Narvin's eyes blink open and he gazes down at her like she’s the most exotic and beautiful thing in the cosmos.

“Come, it is time for chips,” she says. 

The chippy is only a few blocks out of the way, and since they don’t have any money, Leela pulls the psychic paper out of the jacket she’s still wearing and presents it to the man behind the counter. “We want two containers of chips.”

The man glances at the both of them, tattered and bruised, and then reads the paper a second time. Scratching the grease-covered apron over his belly, he frowns skeptically. “You lot are health inspectors?”

“That’s what the paper says, isn’t it?” Narvin replies, wielding all the cold authority he’s developed over centuries spent navigating the politically fraught corridors of the Capitol. Even with a bowtie tied around his head and his shirttail untucked, he achieves an impeccable balance of condescension and command that makes the man stand up straighter and swallow nervously. “We’ll begin by inspecting your … chips,” he continues, only tripping slightly over the word, “and then we’ll inspect everything else, from top to bottom. If we find anything amiss, I’ll ensure that you spend the rest of your career assigned to mess duty in outer Prydonia.”

Leela doesn’t know if Narvin’s tone of commanding disdain was sufficient to strike the fear of government censure into this man, or if the TARDIS’s translation circuits turned his last threat into something comprehensible to an Earthling’s ear, but he promptly hands over two greasy, overflowing papers full of fried potatoes. Then he disappears into his kitchen and begins frantically banging around.

The front door of the shop jingles quietly behind them as they leave.

As they stroll back to the TARDIS, Narvin plucks a single chip from his enormous paper-full and gingerly nibbles on one end. His nose wrinkles as he chews and swallows. “Salty,” he says. He takes another bite. “A truly egregious amount of oil.” He finishes the chip. “The texture is strange, how can food be both not soft enough, and not crispy enough at the same time?”

Happily stuffing her face full of potatoes, Leela doesn’t reply.

Narvin keeps muttering about the chips’ shortcomings as he crams them into his mouth, until his fingers are covered in grease and his chip paper is completely empty. He immediately reaches over to seize a handful from Leela’s stash, to continue eating. As a testament to her affection, she allows him to do it.

As they approach the alley behind the club, Narvin distractedly licks the oil from his fingers. Leela seizes him one more time, kissing him and tasting the salt on his lips, before they climb back into the TARDIS. With the hum and grind of temporal engines, the spare dumpster disappears from the alley, leaving no trace that anyone or anything had ever been there, at all.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, massive thanks to my beta reader [redtailedhawk90](redtailedhawk90.tumblr.com), who has the perfect knack of making my writing better, and who I appreciate more than I can say. (Also she rightly pointed out that my Doctor/Rose shipper is showing hard in this story, and I decided I'm just gonna let that flag fly.)


End file.
